Saturday, June 25, 2011

One door closes and another one opens

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our last alliance (Burn Away) is dead.  We at the Black Sail have decided to continue on with our own plans for Eve domination.  I just created the alliance Yarr Collective with Black Sail as the executor corp.  On top of that, we have created the Gray Sail Anarchists as a training academy for newer and less experienced applicants to the Black Sail.  We have also created an industrial corp with the intent of using it to supply the alliance with cheap ships and hopefully to turn a profit.

Yarr Collective is not accepting any other corps just yet.  We are going to continue to build up Black Sail and fill Gray Sail with pilots that we can mold into awesome pirates.  We are going to get a decent income stream from our indy corp and fill our coffers.  Once we get everything running smooth, then we will start accepting other pirate corps into the alliance (if any want to join).

I've very excited about this new direction we are taking.  I have good directors and motivated people to work toward the goal.  With that being said, we are still recruiting.  If you are a decent player and want to try to pirate life, Black Sail may be for you.  If you are new to the game/PVP but want a shot at low sec, Gray Sail could right up your alley.

We are also looking for people that enjoy working with noobs to help with training and fittings.  And if you are a miner or manufacturing pilot who would like to be associated with a pirate corp and yarr on the side, try our indy corp, White Sail Anarchists.  All of you can drop into our public chat "blacksailpub" if you have questions.

*note*

Corp thieves can look elsewhere.  I'm a pirate and I read the blogs.  Access to assets will be strictly limited, especially in the indy corp.  Oh and Incarna sucks my balls.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Another day, another alliance

We joined Burn Away and everything seemed to be going fairly well.  But just as we were starting to get comfortable with the alliance and do some joint hunting, we got notified that the alliance was shutting down.  Apparently the alliance head, Rixx Jarvis, has to take a break from Eve due to RL issues.  I understand that completely.  After all, real life come first to a spaceship game and I wish him the best.  However I was very surprised that no other corp members stepped up to take over as alliance head.  I asked Rixx about it and was told that none of the members were willing to accept the responsibility.

It seems strange to me because Lucifer's Hammer seemed like a real close group of guys.  I dunno what the deal is but Burn Away is effectively dead in the water less than two weeks after we joined them.  Regardless, we aren't letting this slow us down.  In fact, we are actually speeding up.  Recruiting has been amped up and we are starting a new pirate training corp that will affiliated with Black Sail.  This is roughly modeled after the Black Rabbits and their Black Rabbits Academy.  We are also starting to form an industrial corp (similar to the White Rabbits) to help us fund the academy and hopefully get a ship supply program going.

I'm really excited about it.  While recruiting I found that many people were interested in trying piracy but just didn't meet our initial requirements.  An "academy" will let us evaluate the newer players, guide them, and then have a nice pool of experienced low sec pvpers to recruit from.  While we still haven't gotten all the details ironed out, it should be operational soon.

There is still some talk about if we should join another alliance or make our own at this point.  I am leaning towards creating our own and eventually having other pirate corps join if they want.  We are still a long way from that point but it is a goal we can start working towards soon.

In other news, I love our new system of Lisbaetanne.  It is a very active system and we have a ton of kills there already.  When we are tired of killing the noobs, there are several skilled pvp pirate corps in the area that give us good fights.  I have extended an invitation to all the Lucifer Hammer pilots who would like to join up but that offer is going to expire soon and we will be truly independent in a couple of days.

Yarr

Monday, June 13, 2011

Stupid stupid stupid

I went on a roam the other night with the intent of going to a low sec pocket that I like to hunt it.  It was a straight shot through low sec until you come to 3 .5 systems in a row.  Once you go through those, you are back in low sec in the pocket.  I took out a new Stabber Fleet Issue because I wanted some decent power and I wanted to make sure I could avoid the faction police in those high sec systems along the way.

I got to the last low sec system before the first .5 and I decided to run the belts first.  I located a flashy stilleto in the top belt.  Just before I started to lock him a non-flashy dramiel landed next to me.  Since a dramiel is the shiniest of the two, I locked the dramiel and got GCC.  Who cares though, I'm  a pirate right?

Well the dram of course zoomed off before I could kill him and I saw several big ships pop up on directional.  I figured that I should gtfo and continue my journey so I warped to the next gate.  There was a drake sitting there that immediately started to lock me.  No big deal though. I would just jump through the gate and warp to the next system.  So I jumped.  Into a .5 system.  With an active GCC counter.

Hello CONCORD.  Goodbye Stabber Fleet.

I guess that's what happens when you spend all your time in low sec.  You completely forget about high sec game mechanics.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

When the going gets mean, we burn away

That title really makes sense to me, I promise.


So it's finalized and Black Sail is now a proud member of the Burn Away alliance.  I learned about this alliance from following Rixx's blog over at Evoganda. I respected the way they wouldn't put up with the elitist attitude of one alliance or the blue killing of another.  I also like their style.  They seem like a very fun group of guys that just want to enjoy the game and low sec piracy.  Since I was looking to leave Mean at the same time they were looking for member corps, it seemed like a perfect fit.  I look forward to flying with them.

Now the question has been asked of why I pulled out of Mean Coalition.  I hate to air dirty laundry but I haven't been able to PVP much lately and I think we were treated poorly so I guess I need to blog about something eh?

I was never really happy with Mean.  They always seemed fairly unorganized.  The intel channel was a mess of blues from different alliances.  Some were blue to individual corps, some were just friends of directors, so on and so on.  So I never really felt comfortable with it.  It was also like herding cats to get people to use comms.  I can think of multiple engagements where nobody was on comms and people were typing back and forth in several different channels.  It was also hard to get someone to take charge during spur of the moment engagements.  I remember one time when the FC simply announced that he didn't want to FC anymore and was just going to follow instructions IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ENGAGEMENT.  It was just a mess and we got our asses handed to us several times.  I tried to bring it up a few times but was met with indifference.

Another issue was the blue list.  Because you had individual blues and not whole corps, you sometimes ran into these blues roaming in our area with corpmates who weren't blue.  Fights would happen and then you would have the inevitable blue on blue killmails.  It was a real problem.

Spies was another issue.  Mean seems to be blood enemies of Electus Matari and there were always concerns about EM spies in the corp or the intel channel.  I know I heard of several emails from "anonymous" sources that there were spies in my corp.  I think that this was just a tactic by EM to sow discontent within the alliance and I think it worked.

So these were some reasons I was not really happy with Mean.  Now don't think that Mean didn't have its good side as well.  When they pulled it together and got organized, they could do some amazing things.  I can remember several engagements when people actually got on Vent and there was good FC.  Mean absolutely shined during those times and mopped the floor up with their opponents.

I figured Mean has real potential and there are some good people in it that I enjoyed flying with.  For that reason I planned that we would stick it out and try to make things better.  The thing that really set it off was when one of my corp members tried to get a regular roam started during non-peak hours.  This member wanted to try his hand at FCing small gangs and invited people to fly T1 cruisers and frigs during these roams.  He even offered to provide ships to people that wanted to participate.  In the spirit of cooperation, an email was sent to the alliance inviting anyone to attend.

What followed was ridiculous.  The alliance head sent out an email to everyone saying that the roams were not sponsored by the alliance and discouraged anyone from attending.  He then proceeded to insult the member by saying his kb sucked, he was probably a spy, he was a possible corp thief and should join Eve Uni if he wanted to learn PvP.  It was also implied that we were trying to train our members by using the alliance as "meat shields".  We were then told that we needed to investigate our members better and use better judgement.  It was total loony toons.  This guy only wanted T1 ships and offered to supply them!  Hardly the stuff of epic spies.


I was royally pissed that this type of email would be sent across alliance mail instead of being addressed between CEOs or diplomats.  Several email exchanges between myself and the alliance head were very unsatisfactory so I decided that I did not want to be part of an alliance that was so disrespectful to its members.  Since Burn Away had recently had a similar experience with RK, I thought it would be perfect.

I tried to keep the move quiet but word got out quickly and the director of Mean freaked out again.  Another alliance email was sent out berating us for being sneaky or something.  Then we were kicked from the corp and set as nuets.   I was able to talk to him and get us set blue for a week but then one of my members was still on their vent.  He passed on that they were planning on ganking us despite our blue status.  Pretty classy.

Well luckily we based a couple of jumps from the main alliance members so we were able to avoid them and most of us have moved our stuff out.  We lost a couple of members that didn't want to move across the galaxy but that is to be expected.  In a couple of days everything will be settled in and we will start actively recruiting to get back up to full strength.  I'm glad to be out of Mean and it feels like a weight is off our backs. Now we can get back to the basics of low sec pvp.